


A Thousand Years

by taemoon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 23:32:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taemoon/pseuds/taemoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’d been a thousand years and Merlin still hadn’t moved on. Not in the slightest. The pain of losing Arthur was just as excruciating as it was the day he died, and the memory just as vivid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Years

It’d been a thousand years and Merlin still hadn’t moved on. Not in the slightest. The pain of losing Arthur was just as excruciating as it was the day he died, and the memory just as vivid. He’d put his magic on the backburner shortly after Arthur died—he had no use for it now—and opted for a simple, quiet life not far from the shore of Lake Avalon. For a long, long, time Merlin was content with simply waiting, living in his dank cabin by the lake, drowning his sorrows in tobacco and hard liquor, and allowing himself to age slowly and not-so-gracefully. He’d watched the happenings of the world over the years passively, knowing he was capable of helping, but never feeling particularly inclined to. He simply sat back in his drunken stupor and watched as society progressed and regressed. He watched the world’s population dwindle as the black plague hit, he watched the industrial revolution and the journey to the Americas, he watched as World War I hit, and then World War II, utterly unaffected each time, only hoping, praying that each would be Albion’s darkest hour, the event that would raise his king from the grave. But each time nothing happened, and seeing the ending of each event without Arthur’s return resulted in downing as many bottles of whiskey as his everlasting liver could take, which, considering it was everlasting, was a lot.

Sometime after the chaos and disaster that was the ‘60s, he had a thought. Merlin’s first real thought in years besides “I need some more damned whiskey.” He thought about how he’d spent the entirety of his extraordinarily long life on the English countryside, and he never had any interest in seeing the rest of the world, even as trains and cars and planes were invented, and travelling became easier than he could have ever imagined. He thought about his quiet life just outside the town of Glastonbury, seeing things only from the crappy television he’d managed to acquire somewhere along the line, and outside the dusty window of his tiny cabin facing the Glastonbury Tor, and decided that maybe he wanted to see more. After everything that had happened, hundreds and hundreds of years of waiting, watching from a distance, maybe it was time to join the world, or at least to observe it from a different angle. And so he travelled. He left behind the form of an old man in favor of how he once looked, a boy in his twenties, figuring it might be easier. He never stayed away for long, only leaving the side of the dried-up lake for a month at the most, afraid that if he stayed away for too long, Arthur might return in his absence and find himself lost and alone in this new world. For about forty years he did this, going to America, Germany, Japan. He found new places to go each year, and sometimes returned to others. The travelling made Merlin feel refreshed, and, although he was nowhere near being the whole and happy person he was when Arthur was alive, at least his drinking habits had reduced to being only somewhat unhealthy.

When he decided to settle down again, he got a job as a bartender at the Avalon, a local pub, because having something to do might help him refrain from falling back into old habits. He was still waiting. He still went to the Tor as much as possible, hoping to see the return of his king, and it was still painful. But he had met some people at work, who were slowly shifting from acquaintances to good acquaintances, and had even managed to get a small smile out of him once or twice, and slowly but surely, he was starting to feel slightly better.

Until, of course, a dirty, blond man wearing a torn red cape and rusted chainmail barrelled through the door of the Avalon, wielding his sword and demanding know exactly where _in god’s name_ was he, and who the _bloody hell_ all those people were.


End file.
